BSP Annual Conference 2018: feedback

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We asked attendees of the 2018 BSP Annual Conference what they thought of the event, with a special prize draw.

Over the last few years the BSP Annual Conference has gone from strength to strength, seeing a growth in the amount of submissions and an increase in attendance. And 2018 was the best year yet. However, we wanted to check in with the BSP membership who attended the event to better understand what went well, what not so well, and how we can improve things going forwards. As a wee bit of fun and to encourage participation all responders who wanted to, were entered into a draw for one person to win free attendance to the 2019 Annual Conference. We also promised we would share the results.

First off, thank you to everyone who completed the survey. We got 17 responses, and a wealth of feedback. There can only be one lucky winner of the prize draw though! And that was Hannah Berry, PhD Researcher at the University of Liverpool. Congratulations!

Overall, the results from the survey were really encouraging. 47% of people who attended joined us for the first time. The conference experience was generally seen as being excellent, especially the quality and variety of papers given by the speakers.

Several areas were identified where we need to improve. Top of the list was the length of the days. We will definitely be looking at this going forwards. Indeed, our respondees have suggested some ways in which we could do this too. You can check out what people said in the full report.

Despite the long days, in the final analysis the conference scored an excellent. As did people saying it would help with their research, that they would recommend the conference to others, and that they would attend again. Awesome.

To finish, one of the respondees wrote: ‘This might be too much to ask… but I hope we could have access to the full papers presented at the conference’. This is not too much to ask! We recorded many of the papers for our podcast channel. Watch this website and our social feeds from early January 2019, when we will be releasing a paper as a podcast every Friday.